148 ◾ Patricia E. Nalwoga Lutu
understanding phase focuses on understanding the project objectives from a business
perspective, converting this understanding into a data mining problem denition, and
then developing an initial plan for achieving the objectives.
It goes without saying (but it should be noted from Figure8.1) that data is at
the core of data mining activities. e importance of the data is emphasized by the
fact that two phases: data understanding and data preparation are dedicated to the
preprocessing of data. e data understanding phase starts with an initial data col-
lection and proceeds with activities to get familiar with the data, to identify data
quality problems, to discover rst insights into the data, and to detect interesti ...